Electronic addresses are pervasive in today's highly connected society. Although electronic addresses are generally associated with electronic mail (email), electronic addressing is much broader. For example, an electronic address permits the unique identification of individuals, groups, software applications, electronic accounts, and the like. Moreover, electronic addressing can provide handles for applications allowing collaboration among various applications.
Typically, an organization and/or an enterprise are forced to manage large numbers of electronic addresses. These electronic addresses are frequently added, changed, and/or modified within the organization and/or the enterprise. Accordingly, attempting to administer electronic addresses within the organization and/or the enterprise becomes challenging software development, maintenance, and support exercises, which can consume considerable resources of the organization and/or the enterprise.
Furthermore, an organization's email system can include many thousands of electronic mail (e.g., email) addresses. Conventionally, these electronic addresses are hard coded within the email system. And generally, the organization follows a standard email addressing policy such that a single format can be used to reliably identify a single individual's email address within the organization.
For example, some organizations may enforce an email addressing policy that identifies individuals by only their last names followed by an “@” delimiter and the organization's domain name (e.g., organization.com, organization.edu, organization.org, and others). If the organization is a small organization, then adopting such a policy may not cause conflicts for the organization's email addressing policy. Conflicts occur when the email addressing policy adopted by the organization fails to produce a unique email address (e.g., two or more individuals within the organization have the same email address).
So, in the presented example, if the organization had two individuals with a last name of “Smith,” then exceptions to the policy would have to be instituted by the organization, since two email addresses identified, as a single email address of “smith@organization.com” would result, if the organization's email addressing policy were not augmented in some way to prevent the conflict.
One such modification might be to permit an individual's first initial to appear appended to the beginning of the individual's last name followed by the “@” character and the organization's domain name. Thus, if the first names of the two Smiths were Kent and Dave, then the respective email addresses would be “ksmith@organization.com” and “dsmith@organization.com.” Of course since the first initial is now permissible within the organization's email addressing policies, each and every email address will now also include alternate email addresses reflecting the augmented policy. And, each and every email address will have to be manually updated to reflect the augmented policy.
Additionally, in some instances when an electronic addressing policy is changed, the changed policy can invalidate previous acceptable electronic addresses. When this occurs within an organization, modifications to each affected electronic address must be made within the organization, or previously acceptable electronic addresses will fail. Having electronic addresses fail can be catastrophic for the ongoing business of the organization.
In fact, electronic addressing policies change frequently based on additional conflicts or improvements made to the policies to improve operational efficiency within organizations. As a result, the organizations are forced to continually evaluate and decide whether it is appropriate and necessary to update or modify policies. But, since the electronic addresses are generally hard coded within the organizations' systems (e.g., email systems, database systems, messaging systems, and the like) making modifications to existing policies require manually changing each and every electronic address affected by the changed policy.
In many circumstances, the manual exercise of changing each and every affected electronic address will consume precious software development, support, and maintenance resources within the organization, since each and every affected resource within the organization must be manually modified when policies change or are augmented in some way.
As is now apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art, conventional electronic addressing policies within organizations are based on static policies that cannot be dynamically modified by the organization. Such rigid hard coded policies are not conducive to the dynamic environment of the organizations, and therefore are inefficient.
As is now apparent, there exists a need for improved techniques that institute dynamic electronic addressing policies so that an organization is free to change, add, or augment existing policies without having to manually alter existing electronic addresses within the organization. Furthermore, there exists a need for techniques that do not require electronic addresses to be hard coded within the systems of the organization.